Every time when I install a new Linux Mint, I have to uninstall pulseaudio and install alsa or something like that. From what I see, quite a lot of people has problems with pulseaudio. It would be really nice if there would be some application or something like that for enabling and disabling sound systems without doing all the searching the web for how to and then copy-pasting all that stuff into the terminal.

Morgan Krieg wrote:Every time when I install a new Linux Mint, I have to uninstall pulseaudio and install alsa or something like that.

This is a very common misconception which has been propagated by many people, particularly on the Ubuntu forums.

PulseAudio runs on top of ALSA. If ALSA was not installed then PulseAudio would not run at all.

Therefore you cannot replace PulseAudio by installing ALSA, you can just choose to run your sound applications via the ALSA "layer" rather than through PulseAudio running on top of ALSA, which its-self consists of a user layer alsalib running on top of ALSA kernel modules specific to the chips in your sound devices(s).

In a very simplified representation --

PulseAudio|ALSA library|ALSA kernel modules|hardware sound devices

PulseAudio also provides networking features to send sound from an application running on one PC to a PulseAudio server running on another PC.

Many common PulseAudio problems (but not all) are due to poor configuration of the underlying ALSA sound devices (eg USB sound devices need to be properly ordered so that the preferred default is card0) and the improper selection of which ALSA sound device to use for input and output.